You know that great advice about “don’t read the comments”? Nextdoor is essentially what you would get if a website was just the comments section. It’s truly the worst thing on the internet, a toxic blend of NIMBYism, fear-mongering, and (in many communities) unvarnished racism. My old neighborhood had a Nextdoor group, but my current one doesn’t, and I am so, so grateful for it.
As such, Nextdoor is basically the perfect forum for a rearguard action to revive CACs, since the synergy between the two is basically a Venn diagram where the two circles almost completely overlap. Nextdoor and CACs, a match made in … well, somewhere.
My Nextdoor feed is mostly about cars getting broken into, or reporting on kids looking suspicious. But, it’s free, and already established. So, go for it.
We may see our first glimpse into what the new citizen engagement process will look like at the June 9 council meeting.
At the February 4 City Council meeting staff was directed to create an informal solicitation process to identify a consultant with expertise in community engagement to prepare recommendations to improve the community engagement process. Staff considered the qualifications of three possible service providers and reported back to Council at their May 5, 2020, meeting, with the recommendation to contract with ML Fearn LLC. Council approved the recommendation and directed staff to move forward.
The consultant will share the scope of work, his vision, and perspective on how the City of Raleigh can achieve the best outcomes in the community engagement process.
Sorry for the long attachment but I received this email the other day about the new rendition of the CAC.
Called Livable Raleigh? I wasn’t aware others took so much pride and usefulness in CACs.
"My name is Christina Jones and I am the current Chairperson for the Raleigh Citizens Advisory Council. I am writing to you because you were subscribed to the City of Raleigh’s CAC contact list during a past meeting you attended. This list will be very-low volume as we respect your inbox but should you decide you no longer want to receive emails regarding CACs there is a link at the bottom of every email for unsubscribing.
A lot has happened since February 4th and we have been regrouping and working on who we are as an organization, now that we are grass roots instead of city funded. I wanted to briefly explain our actions since January 1st of this year so that you have all of the information that we do in regards to our abolishment.
I spoke in front of the City Council at their January 7th Council meeting to reintroduce CACs to the new council and to ask that we start fresh. I met with David Knight and our Vice Chair, Robert Rice, a few weeks later to discuss his intention on supporting CACs. He let us know that there were a few councilors not in support of us and gave us Saige Martin’s contact information. I did not hear back from Saige until the morning of February 4th while I was at work. He texted me to ask if I could talk, which I could not, and they disbanded CACs in that afternoon’s meeting. I heard about it from our former Chairperson, Shelley Winters, around 3:30pm and I had to be sent home from work because I was so distraught. We held our regularly scheduled retreat that Saturday, but closed it off to the public so our leadership team had time to grieve together and form a new plan.
A month later, COVID-19 entered our lives and gave us another punch in the gut. We could no longer meet in person and it became increasingly difficult to juggle all of the moving pieces. Since March, we have met virtually as an RCAC and have had steady increased participation so it is time we begin to reach out to the community.
WE ARE STILL HERE! Our mission to advocate for Raleigh residents is still in every fiber of our leadership team and many CACs are beginning to meet virtually so we can begin to reestablish our connection. Thanks to our amazing team, we have begun establishing an RCAC website so there is a central place to send new residents, but many of our CACs have a social media presence and we encourage everyone to like us on Facebook under “Raleigh Citizens Advisory Council”.
The support of Raleigh residents has been clear from Day 1 and we appreciate it very much. We are currently focusing on learning everything we can in order to continue to be a source of information for Raleigh. Our meetings won’t look the same, but we are hopeful that with your continued support, we can make CACs even better than they were before!
Thank you for everything!
Christina Jones
P.S. The Raleigh CAC is not the only group working to keep CACs alive. One such group, Liveable Raleigh, reached out to us in an effort to keep CAC advocates informed on important city issues. Liveable Raleigh’s steering committee consists of many former CAC chairs and city councilmembers."
Liveable Raleigh seems most associated with a certain (northernmost) member of the city council and semi-actively engaged in social media heckling with YIMBY Raleigh / other members of the council in addition to extolling the virtues of the CAC format. In hindsight, it seems it would’ve been better served to see the engagement arm of local government lean in fully to embrace citizen voices through a hybrid model? At this point, the chosen path for eliminating the CACs was at best poorly executed (…but I understand why - mentioning the idea would’ve received as much vitriol as actually deciding to move on) and at worst (…as yet to be seen since we’re still awaiting that plan) a fiasco since the glacial pace of consultant(s) reimagining our processes will be hampered by current events even though the goal was to create a platform that didn’t necessarily require in person attendance to receive citizen feedback.
Again, round and round…
From what I’ve been reading on the news and on this site’s discussions, it sounds like quite a few NIMBYs (and people in general with the time/resources on their hands to be a part of such discussions -who stereotypically tend to be old, rich white people) do take pride in CACs.
I think that’s really hard to say since “having CACs” and “not having CACs” are mutually exclusive; you can’t have a hybrid of both. I do agree that eliminating CACs were super sudden and poorly executed, though I still feel like it was a political necessity.
But what’s done is done, and what’s happening is already happening. I think our time and energy is better spent talking about the present and upcoming future.
Going back to the meeting @dtraleigh brought up, it looks like the consultant leading the redesign efforts has a good eye on the values of participatory governance, as well as what anti-CAC people perceived of the old system.
Yep, I do get that it needed to happen and that nothing stays the same. By hybrid, I was suggesting some public meetings and more virtual but that, of course, is a matter of personal preference.
I’m for a livable Raleigh not part of ‘Liveable Raleigh’, heh heh…
If the council or the task force has nothing, what if we waltz in with ideas?
For example, just like Wake County, the City of Durham is revising its transit plan and recently asked for comments. But they’re also using it to try out what they call “EngageDurham”, where they bake a big, serious, Census-like outreach operation into the long-term planning process.
About this trial run
EngageDurham did a “Listening and Learning” tour earlier this year as a part of creating Durham’s comprehensive transit plan. This process worked by recruiting well-connected local volunteers to reach out to hard-to-reach residents. These stipend-paid “Engagement Ambassadors”:
talk to individual (or small groups of) citizens directly, not through a specific elected official’s platform
listen to citizens’ thoughts, and learn of their individual wishes and priorities
find common threads between comments, and shape that into a policy recommendation
maintain relationships they built with their communities, and repeat all steps as the project progresses (Durham is still figuring out this bit)
Compare this to all of the surveys and studies we keep seeing, where government officials just create forms, expect citizens to come to them with opinions and complaints, and assumes those are the only opinions that matter.
…or worse, CACs, where you give those un-representative voices power.
I spy an update on this posted on the Sept 8 council meeting.
At the February 4 City Council meeting staff was directed to create an informal solicitation process to identify a consultant with expertise in community engagement to prepare recommendations to improve the community engagement process. Staff considered the qualifications of three possible service providers and reported back to Council at their May 5, 2020, meeting, with the recommendation to contract with ML Fearn LLC. Council approved the recommendation and directed staff to move forward.
At the June 9 City Council work session, the consultant shared the scope of work, vision, and perspective on how the City of Raleigh can achieve the best outcomes in the community engagement process. Mr. Fearn will share findings from stakeholder analysis and research, communications plans, and next steps.
As it turns out, his recommendation is to have silo’d small group meetings broken into what are called “Citizen Advisory Councils” where only mobile, retired, English speaking citizens of that region (or really whatever region, there is no validation) can come to speak their mind. We’ll take “votes” of what those small groups representing the region think about projects and share that with city council. We’ll also ask public employees to spend their evenings sharing important (boring) news with the small groups so they can then share with their respective regions.
During the January 5 meeting, Council requested a status update on the Community Engagement Study. During the work session, the Consultant will facilitate a discussion on a recommended model of community engagement options for the Council to consider and give guidance on the next steps.
I think it’s crucial for this council to have a new system in place prior to the next council elections or they will see it at the polls. Lot’s of NIMBY’s up in arms over the cancelling of the CAC’s. If nothing is put into place soon, Cox and the NIMBY coalition will drill this to no end in the campaign.
I heard the consultant, Mickey Fearn, speak on a radio show or podcast - can’t remember exactly - and he was great. Definitely the right person for the job if we want citizen engagement to be for all citizens.
His presentations to council and updates to City Manager are here.
Mickey Fearn (the community engagement consultant) finally gave his long-awaited talk in today’s city council work session to come up with a community engagement mechanism after CACs. You couldwatch his talk on YouTube, listen to city councillors’ questions, or read his slide deck, but I think it’s a bad idea; despite his long talk and text-heavy slides, he’s actually pitching something much more groundbreaking and disruptive.
Sure, Fearn’s final product will functionally replace CACs. But as someone who believes the ultimate goal of a democratic society is constant, universal, and enthusiastic engagement, what he’s really pitching is a re-think of how Raleigh interacts with its citizens. Fearn is asking City Council to question every assumption about who the City of Raleigh is for, how it functions, why it believes in functioning that way, and how it directly impacts every one of its residents. …and everyone from MAB to David Cox are enthusiastically on board with this.
This is the city’s apparent to-do list for this topic:
Create a “core team”: assemble a multi-talented group of city staffers across departments, and put them in charge of examining the city government’s rules, practices, and traditions to see if they undermine the city’s stated values.
Perform a needs assessment: learn what different city residents need, how those needs can be different for different populations, and how different people may answer that question differently in ways that others may not always appreciate. The idea here is to start from a blank slate, and learn about Raleigh residents’ observations and lived experiences (rather than just relying on aggregated statistics) before they come up with any particular solution. For full context, see the mayor’s question here.
Get citizen feedback: ask residents what they think about the values above. The consultant insisted on this point so that the people of Raleigh can take ownership over those values (though I personally disagree with that interpretation).
Clarify City Council values: define what “community engagement” means to City Council, as well as what moral and social values they stand for. Without this, people can make their own assumptions or project their own emotions to city institutions (which are run by people with their own feelings and agendas).
At the end, council members suggested Fearn to work with the new city manager to follow those plans. There seems to be an expectation for some semblance of suggestions by this March, but with the consultant’s insistence on a continuous process, I REALLY doubt this will be a simple, plug-and-play “CAC alternative”.
